ABSTRACT
The first question to ask is how in the collective architectural mind the essence of architecture was perceived. Nineteenth-century science demonstrated that each area of empirical reality had rational and therefore knowable fundamentals which, once they had all been mapped, would reveal a system. This happened in the field of biology, economics and sociology, of health and disease, in industrial processes and technology. Was there any reason why architecture should be an exception to this universal logic? Certainly, architects recognized that like painting and sculpture it was an art, but, unlike painting and sculpture, it was also a science. To look for the fundamentals of architecture in its history was therefore as sensible, it seemed, as geologists studying the history of the earth in order to understand the geological processes of the present. And as with geologists, the historical interest of the leading architects was a means, not an aim in itself; it was, for them, the only way to discover the laws of architecture. The essential characteristic o f these architects, great theorists such as Gottfried Semper and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, was that, just like geologists in their field, they were searching for the solution of the problem of contemporary architecture within architecture itself.
